Key Ideas

• Guatemalan farmers are turning to organic pesticides, rooted in traditional practices and sustainable ideas, to replace expensive synthetic alternatives.
• Using a mixture of locally available plants, and ideas about farming passed down by ancestors, they are creating natural pesticides to protect their plots.
• Cheaper than agrochemicals, these biopesticides are safer to use and don’t cause the ecological damage associated with chemical use.
• Although international interest in biopesticides is growing, agrochemicals still dominate the market.

Mark Hillsdon wrote recently, in Mongabay, about initiatives bringing ancient Maya knowledge to bear on the contemporary challenges facing Guatemalan farmers in ensuring sustainable practices. The writer looks at the history of agrochemical use in Guatemala and how local farmers are integrating natural pesticide use with other farming techniques.

In the mountain villages of Guatemala’s Western Highlands, farmers are combining ancient Maya knowledge with modern sustainable farming techniques to protect their crops from pests and disease.

Smallholders are creating homemade biopesticides using plants with strong smells and flavors to deter pests on their family plots. This is helping to cut back on the use of increasingly expensive agrochemicals, many of which have been labeled as dangerous to human health and linked to soil degradation.

About 60 Guatemalan communities in the Western Highland departments of Sololá and Huehuetenango, as well as Chiquimula in the east, are working to revive these traditional techniques with support from the international development organization World Neighbors. Their focus is to restore and strengthen traditional knowledge, combining it with agroecological practices that help families produce surplus food they can sell to boost household incomes.

“Traditional farming techniques are becoming popular because they are simple practices to apply, use local resources, and have proven to be effective,” Dayani Roche, a program associate at World Neighbors, told Mongabay via email.

Rather than a single ancient recipe, farmers are using “a living combination of ancestral knowledge, local experimentation and more recent agroecological practices,” he said, which are “safer for families, soil, water and biodiversity than many chemical alternatives.”

The Maya civilization, which once stretched across modern-day Central America, had a rich history of farming dating back to 2000 B.C.E. Its most celebrated agriculture system is the milpa, a form of intercropping that involves a mix of maize, beans and squash, each mutually benefiting the other. The maize provides support for the beans, which in turn fix nitrogen into the soil, while the squash acts as weed-suppressing mulch.

There’s also evidence of early biopesticide use, including painting a mixture of burnt lime and water around the base of fruit trees to deter pests from climbing the trunk.

In modern day Guatemala, the whitefly (Trialeurodes vaporariorum) is among the most common pests, attacking crops such as tomatoes, beans and cucumbers. Maize is particularly vulnerable to fall armyworm (Spodoptera frugiperda) infestations, while coffee plants are targeted by the coffee berry borer (Hypothenemus hampei), which damages the bean and its quality.

You can read the full piece, with references, links and photos, here, Ancient Maya knowledge helps Guatemalan farmers cut agrochemical use.

Categories: Environment, Guatemala, Indigenous peoples, Land, Resource Extraction, Solidarity in Action/Guatemala

Tags: Agrochemicals, Biopesticides, Chiquimula, Huehuetenango, Mark Hillsdon, Maya, Mongabay, Natural pesticides, Sololá, World Neighbours